Why Bother

If more people understood how much feeling good actually affects us, right down to the cellular level, there’d be no need for this book because we’d all be dedicating our lives to feeling good 24/7.

Emotions are often called the language of the body, and for good reason. They are a powerful way our cells communicate with each other, and they have an enormous amount of control over our health.

The best way to see this in action is to take a look at what happens to us when we’re not feeling good, and what’s going on inside our minds and bodies when stress takes over our lives. I don’t want to spoil the ending but I think we all know it’s not a pretty picture.

When we’re stressed, our bodies get flooded with chemicals and hormones that are supposed to help us deal with whatever is stressing us out. But that’s the important bit, we’re supposed to deal with the problem and go back to being relaxed. When we don’t, and stay stressed for long periods of time, things get really bad, really fast.

The problem comes from two hormones you’ve probably heard lots about. The first one is adrenaline, responsible for our fight or flight response, and in controlled doses, quite a fun thing to experience. People can even get addicted to the “rush” it gives you.

The second, and more important one is cortisol. This little hormone can do some pretty incredible things to help us survive in dangerous situations. One of them is to slow down all the functions in your body that aren’t necessary for fighting or running for your life, including weakening your immune system.

The bottom line is, if your life’s in danger, stress is your new best friend. It’ll give you the energy you need and optimise your body for survival. It’s pretty impressive, and deserves our respect.

But we are not respecting stress. Not even close.

We’ve accepted it as part of our everyday lives, feeling its effects while we sit safely in office chairs, or even while we lie awake in bed at night.

These hormones are powerful. They’re designed to keep you alive in the face of real danger. Flooding your body with stress hormones while a bear charges at you is a very good idea. Doing it before your 9 am meeting is not.

Chronic stress is when you feel this way the majority of the time. It’s been linked to all manner of bad things, including cancer, heart disease, anxiety, depression, and a weaker immune system.

It’s really bad for you, there’s just no way around that. Too much stress is slowly killing you.

We could put aside every other point in this book, and it would still be worth building more confidence just to help you manage your stress levels.

Ignoring the impact that our state of mind has on our body is a mistake we should know better than to make these days. One of my all time favourite examples is something I learnt quite a lot about while studying psychology. It’s a mysterious and awesome skill that we all have inside us. And you probably use it a lot more than you realise.

Pain or Placebo

The Placebo Effect has been studied extensively and regularly outperforms other treatments, especially for things like pain and depression.^{Note 1} If you expect something will help you feel better, it’s more likely it actually will.

It’s also been shown to work in the opposite direction, known as the Nocebo Effect. Expecting a bad outcome often causes one, even if the treatment you were given does nothing to you. Your negative expectations alone are enough to trigger real negative symptoms in your mind and body.^{Note 2}

Our emotional response to treatment, whether the treatment is real or just a harmless placebo, will ultimately change the way our body responds to it.

The placebo and nocebo effects work on a spectrum between how strong the actual treatment is (whether we’ve been given actual medicine or not), and how strong our internal response is (how much we expect the treatment to work or not). In extreme cases, our internal response can completely override the actual response from the treatment, which is how you get cases of people ridding themselves of all pain with nothing but sugar pills and a strong belief in the treatment.

There are even claims that the Placebo Effect can cure terminal illnesses, but whether or not our minds really are that powerful is a long way from being proven. One of the things we do know for sure is that if you’re in pain and want some relief, a placebo is probably all you need.

In 2014, a study was done to test the Placebo Effect on 66 people having severe migraines.^{Note 3} If you’ve never had a migraine before, you can imagine it like having your head split open and your brains lit on fire. It’s painful.

They ran the study by giving the participants a pill each time they had a migraine. The pill was either a strong migraine medication called Maxalt, or a placebo.

The trick to the experiment was that the pills could be labelled as “Maxalt”, “Placebo”, or “Maxalt or placebo”. So it was possible to get medication you think is fake, and fake medication you think is the real deal.

The participants had to rate how bad their pain was at the start of the migraine, and then rate it again two and a half hours after taking the pill. And the results show just how important our expectations are when it comes to treating pain.

Being given a Maxalt labelled as a placebo gave you the same amount of pain relief as a placebo labelled as Maxalt. Taking fake medicine you think will work is just as good as taking real medicine you think won’t.

The highest amount of relief came from pills labelled as Maxalt, whether they were actually Maxalt or not. And the placebo pills were shown to be a much better option than taking no treatment at all.

So when it comes to pain, we can be confident that it really is mind over matter. Having positive expectations will take pain away. Negative expectations will keep it hanging around.

As impressive as this is, the Placebo Effect has even more to offer us.

It’s been shown to have a powerful impact on one of the hardest things to treat. Depression.

A 2015 study similar to the one on migraines was run with 35 people.^{Note 4} They were all given placebo pills, but some of them were labelled as a fast-acting antidepressant. The rest were just labelled as a placebo.

After one week of taking the pills, everyone was given a PET scan to measure their brain activity. The people who had been taking pills labelled as an antidepressant were also given an injection during the scan and were told it could help with their depression. The injection was just another placebo, but at the end of the study everyone was treated with real antidepressant medication. The results of the scans however, show that the Placebo Effect is once again able to hold its own against real medication.

The people who thought they were taking antidepressants reported a drop in depression symptoms, and their PET scan showed that the areas of their brains associated with emotion and stress regulation had increased brain activity compared to the other group.

These people also had a better response to the real antidepressants they were given after the study, showing that the placebos gave them a head start in their treatment.

All of this boils down to one simple fact. Our expectations matter. How we feel matters. Positive expectations help keep us healthy, and negative expectations do the opposite.

No matter how much work you put into yourself, how well you eat, how much you exercise, how much time you spend with loved ones, or how successful you become… if it doesn’t make you feel good, then it isn’t good for you.

This is why chronic stress is so damaging. It keeps you feeling horrible throughout the entire day, even while doing things that should be making you feel better about yourself.

This is what confidence is all about. Being able to feel good despite what’s happening around you. Believing in yourself and what you’re capable of achieving. Feeling so assured in who you are that nothing can shake you. It’s the antidote to fear. And it will change you right down to the very centre of your cells.

This chapter was just a brief introduction to these ideas. It would take an entire book to cover it completely, and there are many that do exactly that.

For now, all you need to understand is that how you feel matters. We can’t escape stress entirely but we can put our foot down and fight to remove it from our day to day lives. We can take the pursuit of confidence seriously, not just because we want to be free from stress, pain, and suffering, but because our very lives may depend on it.